thismomentinblackhistory:The striking down of sodomy laws "affirmed the lifestyle." If Jesus returned tomorrow he wouldn't give these two the time of day.

Agreed. I also think that were this Jesus to return tomorrow his first order of business would be to go after the money men, the people who have bought and paid to make everything in this world to their liking; the lobbyists, the corporatists, the politicians etc who have farked us all over royally.

I love how they try to boil it down to whether or not two men or two women can have children.

By that logic, infertile people should not be allowed to marry, because infertile people do not have children. Or older people who have lost a spouse, or just met the right person after menopause can't marry because post-menopausal women cannot have children. I don't think those arguments would fly, so why should they for gay couples?

namegoeshere:The state has no say in who marries, and marriage has no legal meaning. It is strictly a religious institution. Each religious institution can choose who can marry in their church.

Ship captains and judges have been marrying people for hundreds of years and atheists have been getting married without all the pesky religious ritual for decades. And yet - its only when the gheys want to get married that the word "marriage" now has magical special meaning and only belongs to religious sects.

They are actually right, most gay couples are going to discover when they split how bad divorce sucks. Keeping your own separate legal identities has advantages. However they should have the same right to make stupid mistakes us straights do and pay just as high a price for making them.

Psychopusher:Newsflash to Pat Robertson: Your spiralling descent into irrelevance pleases me. Do make more such statements. Flailing your arms in righteous panic and decreeing "BECAUSE GOD" on matters of no direct concern to you and yours will only hasten gravity's inevitable pull on your sad, deluded carcass. History will cast a wearied look upon your legacy and shake its head at the nonsense humans used to busy itself with.

Newsflash to Pat Robertson: Your spiralling descent into irrelevance pleases me. Do make more such statements. Flailing your arms in righteous panic and decreeing "BECAUSE GOD" on matters of no direct concern to you and yours will only hasten gravity's inevitable pull on your sad, deluded carcass. History will cast a wearied look upon your legacy and shake its head at the nonsense humans used to busy itself with.

Two16:letrole: Homosexual marriage is pursued as a means to an end. Homosexuals, by an exceedingly large margin, do not wish to get married or to form civil unions. Rather, they want to be accepted as normal. Their hope is that public approval of homosexuality will follow the legal establishment of homosexual marriages.

This just a rewording of what Robertson has already said. You used to be so much better at this. :tsk tsk:

4/10

Ummm ... 99.999% of his posts are "Atheism is a religion". He has never been good at this.

He doesn't have an original or logical thought in his head. He is a simpleton who parrots stupid people.

serpent_sky:I love how they try to boil it down to whether or not two men or two women can have children.

By that logic, infertile people should not be allowed to marry, because infertile people do not have children. Or older people who have lost a spouse, or just met the right person after menopause can't marry because post-menopausal women cannot have children. I don't think those arguments would fly, so why should they for gay couples?

"The concern is that redefining marriage as a genderless institution will sever its abiding connection to its historic traditional procreative purposes, and it will refocus the purpose of marriage and the definition of marriage away from the raising of children and to the emotional needs and desires of adults," Cooper said.

Justice Elena Kagan, an appointee of President Barack Obama, pressed Cooper on that argument, asking him why then the government could not bar couples who are both over the age of 55 from marrying, on the assumption that they are infertile.

Cooper replied that it would violate the Constitution to ban older people from marrying.

That's right - the guy arguing that gays shouldn't be able to marry because they can't procreate believes it would be unconstitutional to ban older people from marrying due to their inability to procreate.

That they, and other evangicals, clergyman, etc. like them can't or won't see the times changing (even when it's a giant semi at full speed and they're all standing in the middle of the highway) pretty much tells us the relevancy of religion.

I hope Pat lives to be 300 - long enough to see the Christianity he preaches either die entirely or be ignored in favor of a more hippy-dippy Christianity (how's THAT for irony?). I hope his 300-year-old brain remains as healthy as it is now, so that he sees all this happen. I hope he keeps biatching about it, so much that on the last episode of The 700 Club, he asks "Why have you forsaken me?" and the answer is a resounding "BECAUSE YOU'RE A PRICK AND THE GOD YOU WORSHIP IS EVEN WORSE."

The state has no say in who marries, and marriage has no legal meaning. It is strictly a religious institution. Each religious institution can choose who can marry in their church.

"Domestic Partnership Contract" is what is issued by the state, and is a legally binding contract. As long as the partners are adults able to legally enter a contract, anyone can become Domestic Partners. No religious institution has any influence.

I've been arguing this exact point for years.

And you're wrong to do so. "Marriage" is already a civil partnership, regardless of what the religious nutters say. Changing the name to spare their tender feelings just shows that we lack the balls to stand up for what is right.

The reason a civil union or any such contract with another name won't work is that marriages have been tested and upheld as legal protections throughout Common Law in 49 of the 50 states, on the US Federal level, and even going back to our Common Law sources (the UK).

Only Louisiana is a Canon Law state (a remnant of the Napoleonic Code but also what you find in the majority of Europe). Canon Law doesn't bother with the Common Law approach to jurisprudence, so a new law can actually replace something and hold up in court.

Note also that it doesn't matter what marriage means to individual religions: we're talking about a civil contract with the same name.

For the rest of the USA and therefore on the Federal level, courts perform the legal tests that solidify (okay, encrust) legal precedence. Marriage has been tested a lot and never loses: a marriage in Arkansas or Alaska is legal in all the other states and nations of the world.

Nothing beats a marriage for inheriting legal privileges. When two people marry, the state rewards them as if they just had a late bar mitzvah. Discounts on insurance, priorities for mortgages, even coupons. THERE IS MONEY IN THAT DEAL! You put a ring on it and the whole world backs off.

If I die, my wife gets my crap before my mother would get anything. (She'd probably sell my vinyl collection wicked fast because she's scared of my turntable but I'd be dead and she'd need to pay the rent.) She gets no questions about visiting me in the hospital (before and even after I'm dead). We get a sweet, scha-weeet tax discount for being married -- from the IRS and from our state. I just need to stay alive... what's this bottle of poison doing here?

Civil unions are a new construct, and they keep failing legal tests. DOMA was created explicitly to dismiss Hawaiian civil unions as getting any Federal legal precedent.

Now, let me tie this together:1) Homosexuality is not illegal in the United States. Thus the practices of homosexuals no longer make them criminals as they had until recently.2) Thus homosexuals get equal protection under the law.3) The Fourteenth Amendment does not allow for partial citizenship: each person gets equal protection under the law.4) Previous legal tests for marriage restrictions BETWEEN CITIZENS have been dismissed. In particular, miscegenation laws are illegal and got tossed in all states as a recent of a 1965 Supreme Court decision.

The "well, we'd rather see kids have parents of different sexes" argument and "I think the ghey is icky and I found something in the Bible that backs up my opinion" argument fail these tests. Saying that a civil union would be sufficient makes it separate, therefore unequal. Only marriage will do.

Your solution is really nothing more than a "we can't let gay people have access to marriage because they would sully the term, so I'll cleverly propose that we rename 'marriage' for everyone (but us good heterosexual folks will still have real marriages)" troll. And your attempt to deflect from that is transparent.

Oh fark you long and hard on that one there. I support gay marriage. My church performs gay marriage, and would continue to do so. Many churches support and perform gay marriage and would continue to do so. I think it would be farking great if same sex marriage was universally accepted. It's not. It's not going to be. So bag the whole farking institution then. Fark it.

If you want to disagree with me on religious vs civil marriage, fine. But don't you farking DARE put that "good heterosexuals real marriage" bullshiat on me. fark you.

You support same sex "domestic partnerships", while saying that religious institutions should have sole domain over the term "marriage". All your fake indignation and outrage is not going to change that fact.

Keep reading. You missed it the first time. I don't give a flying rats ass who uses the term "marriage." farking flip the damn terms, who gives a shiat. It is a farking shiny thing distracting from the fact that forming a legal family unit between adults should not be the same thing at all as a religious ceremony. The legal contract should be 100% secular. You can say that it is but it is not because it is not open to all who wish it because of no reason other than religious disagreement.

Your solution is really nothing more than a "we can't let gay people have access to marriage because they would sully the term, so I'll cleverly propose that we rename 'marriage' for everyone (but us good heterosexual folks will still have real marriages)" troll. And your attempt to deflect from that is transparent.

Oh fark you long and hard on that one there. I support gay marriage. My church performs gay marriage, and would continue to do so. Many churches support and perform gay marriage and would continue to do so. I think it would be farking great if same sex marriage was universally accepted. It's not. It's not going to be. So bag the whole farking institution then. Fark it.

If you want to disagree with me on religious vs civil marriage, fine. But don't you farking DARE put that "good heterosexuals real marriage" bullshiat on me. fark you.

No it doesn't. Not for everyone. Same sex couples can not legally marry in most of the country. The only onesopposing this are the religious fundamentalists. Their voice needs to be taken out of the equasion.

I retract what I said about good faith and due respect. Now, I think you're being disingenuous.

The situation you're proposing is that we separate the religious and legal institutions. Here's a quote from you:My point was basically to separate the legal institution from the religious one, thus removing the religious argument from the equasion [sic].As I pointed out,that situation currently exists. The legal institution - marriage - is separate from the religious institution - wedlock.

You've now responded by changing your argument, noting that gay people cannot legally marry. Although true, your new point has nothing do with your previously proposed "solution" of separating the legal institution and the religious institution.

Your solution is really nothing more than a "we can't let gay people have access to marriage because they would sully the term, so I'll cleverly propose that we rename 'marriage' for everyone (but us good heterosexual folks will still have real marriages)" troll. And your attempt to deflect from that is transparent.

Many reasons, but the one I prefer is that you're giving in to the wants of the bigots; by backing off and simply changing the definitions to agree with them, you're letting them win. Besides, aside from the potential venue of the wedding, nothing about marriage is religious anyway. They can change their word for it if they so wish.

How is that letting them win? Many churches marry same sex couples. They will continue to do so. But being "married" in the religious sense, for gay or straight, would not enter you into the legal contract of what is now "marriage." That would be a separate, legally binding contract.

This is either intentionally disingenuous or woefully ignorant. In good faith and with all due respect, I assume it's the latter. Specifically, the situation you propose already exists.The religious institution is the noun "wedlock" or the verb "wed": religion currently has the utmost discretion to wed whomever they wish or deny weddings to whomever they wish. Catholics won't wed divorced people. Orthodox Jews won't wed gentiles. Mormons won't wed non-Mormons. Very few places will wed atheists.The legal contract is called "marriage" and has the verb "marry". If you do not sign a state marriage license, you are not married, regardless of the ceremony you had. In fact, there's even a legal doctrine called a putative marriage, in which two people go to a church and have a wedding and believe they are married... but, they actually aren't. The doctrine allows for a few of the rights and privileges of marriage, due to their reasonable and unintentional mistake, but the law is quite clear: even putative spouses are not actually married.

So, essentially what you're proposing is that we redefine the term "marriage" to mean "wedlock" and create a new term "domestic partnership" to mean "marriage". And why should we do this? Why should we abandon the term marriage, when our parents, grandparents, great grandparents, etc. were all married? Because people like Pat Robertson are filled with hate and bigotry? That's quite possibly the worst reason to ever do this.

Additionally, it would violate substantive due process. See Sweatt v. Painter.

I'm not super attached to the terms "marriage" vs "domestic partnership." If you have better ones, great. Bring them on. My point was basically to separate the legal institution from the religious one, thus removing the religious argument from the equasion. You (we, people wanting marriage equality, whomever) are never, ever, ever in a million years going to convince the hardcore fundies that gay marriage is anything but sinful. And as much as I hate it, there are large chunks of the country where those who make the rules are all of that ilk. Separating the religious contract from the legal contract makes that irrelevant. The religious institutions who support marriage equality are free to marry whomever they want, and the fundies are free to keep on not doing that. But neither would have any say into who legally forms a family unit. That would be a separate, universally recognised contract.

See above. That separation already has been done, and is the law. And yet those hardcore fundies are still complaining. As you note, they'll never, ever, ever stop complaining, at least until all gay people are dead or locked up... so why should we give in by even an inch?

Yeah, geez, maybe they just want to be able to get Social Security benefits, inherit property as a spouse, and get on their spouse's employer's health care plan. Or bring them into the country as your spouse for citizenship.

Many people still cite the "if you try to see them in the Emergency Room, you're not family and may get turned away"- which is bull, no hospital would do this nowadays, and even if they did because they had a homophobic family that hates you, well a simple legal doc could fix that.

But the other stuff- the real things here- can't be "fixed" by legal work. You can't make up a contract to give your Social Security "survivor's benefit" to an unrecognized spouse, that's a "legal stranger" and you can't ask the govt to give someone money like that.

You can of course will them your assets, but there can be an estate tax since they're not a legal spouse, and that can be a real problem if the estate lacks liquid assets, e.g. a home with a high real estate value, or farm, but little cash. If there's an estate tax it may be an inheritance you'd have to sell off and move because there's no cash for taxes on that. Whereas legal spouses pay no tax on inheritance.

I May Be Crazy But...:I'm damned sure going to MARRY my fiancee in a week and a half. It ain't a farking business arrangement.

Congrats on the marriage, BTW. But from 20 years the other side of that, yes, it absolutely is a business arrangement. You are forming a legal (hopefully where you are) partnership for your life. I love my husband all the way, but I could have loved him just as much if we had never combined our retirement funds.

If more people thought more about the business side of forming a family unit and less about "but I LOVE him (her) that's all that matters..." then we'd have a lot fewer angry divorced peole.

Fluorescent Testicle:FatherChaos: ... and they "knew" homosexuals were sinners and an abomination in the eyes of God. So they also "knew" gay marriage was out of the question.

Actually, if you remove everything written by Paul (quite possibly the first gay homophobe) and everything that's widely understood to have been mistranslated, the Bible's either neutral on the subject or even pro-equality, depending on how you look at it. The Christians (the loudmothed Christians who just can't shut up about penis-goes-where, before anybody jumps on me for OMG BROAD BRUSH) just use it as a scapegoat; the vast majority have never read it, they just really really love to hate and/or are so deep in the closet they're buttfarking Mr Tumnus.

My usual response to my wingnut releatives is that they already chose to ignore parts of the bible already - why aren't they choosing to ignore a few throw away lines in two random books out of sixty-six? They then go on blabbering about how they don't ignore anything, love Jesus, and eventually their head explodes. By this time I've started by second beer.

In 1747, Benjamin Franklin "knew" that heat was a colorless, odorless fluid.Until dis-proven by Louis Pasteur, everyone "knew" that rats were spontaneously generated by rags on the floor.Until dis-proven as quackery, Craniology was an accurate science everyone "knew" to be the best way to match someone's physical characteristics with their perfect profession.In the 1950s, doctors "knew" that smoking posed no health threats.

And the Bible stories are 2000 years old? What did they "know" at the time? It seems they "knew" Jesus turned water into wine, they "knew" angels could come down from heaven to talk to people, they "knew" plagues of locusts decimated their crops when God was angry, and they "knew" homosexuals were sinners and an abomination in the eyes of God. So they also "knew" gay marriage was out of the question.

Imagine what we'll know tomorrow.

IMO, this has less to do with the "sanctity of marriage" and more to do with the business element. Married couples get tax breaks and spouses can share insurance benefits.

Falwell told MSNBC's Tucker Carlson that if he were a lawyer, he too would argue for civil rights for LGBT people. "I may not agree with the lifestyle, but that has nothing to do with the civil rights of that part of our constituency," Falwell said. When Carlson countered that conservatives "are always arguing against 'special rights' for gays," Falwell said that equal access to housing, civil marriage, and employment are basic rights, not special rights. "Civil rights for all Americans, black, white, red, yellow, the rich, poor, young, old, gay, straight, et cetera, is not a liberal or conservative value. It's an American value that I would think that we pretty much all agree on

letrole:Homosexual marriage is pursued as a means to an end. Homosexuals, by an exceedingly large margin, do not wish to get married or to form civil unions. Rather, they want to be accepted as normal. Their hope is that public approval of homosexuality will follow the legal establishment of homosexual marriages.

When you make spaghetti, do you use butter on the noodles after they've cooked, or just put salt in the boiling water? I think people generally do one or other other, but not both.

My father-in-law is 85 and still uses the term "coloreds". That's about like Pat Robertson's views on gay marriage.

My grandfather was like that. I used to ask him, "what color were they?"

Purple.

You see, long ago God made man in His Holy Image (and women too, ahem), and made them all the many colors of the rainbow. But the orange people, who had no Jersey Shore, wandered away to find better tanning salons, and the blue people went up into outer space, save one who mentored five teenagers to become Power Rangers and fight the evil Rita Repulsa. The green people slowly died off as they were mistaken for trees and cut down, and finally only the purple people, with mystical powers over the forces of the universe, remained. Thus we now await the coming of the Great Purple Leader, who shall bring us out of dark times into salvation.

propasaurus:700 Club host Pat Robertson agreed and added: "The foundation of our society since the founding of our great Republic is under attack by a few people [who] want to have their way doing of sex affirmed by everyone else."

700 Club host Pat Robertson agreed and added: "The foundation of our society since the founding of our great Republic is under attack by a few people [who] want to have their way doing of sex affirmed by everyone else."